Research Interests:I am interested in understanding
visual attention, emotion-cognition interactions, and response
interference effects in individuals who vary in terms of their
personality and emotional temperament (normal, at-risk for
depression, at-risk for mania, at-risk for phobia). Some of my
recent work focuses on the relationship between cognitive load, task
difficulty and visual distractibility. I have also recently proposed
a new two-stage theory of visual attention that is based on the
premise that attention works to diminish uncertainty in a scene.
Using behavioral and imaging methods, I am pursuing two lines of
research on emotion-cognition interactions. The first focuses on the
effects of stimulus relevance and its impact on emotion processing
and attentional control. The second aims at understanding how the
subjective experience of control over experimental events (real and
illusory) changes the way participants respond to emotional events.

Awards:

Awarded a 2016 research grant from the
BRIDGE Birmingham-Illinois partnership initiative.

Lleras, A., & Buetti, S.
(2014). Not all "distractor" tags are created equal: using a
search asymmetry to dissociate the inter-trial effects
caused by different forms of distractors. Frontiers in
Psychology, 5:669. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00669.
Click here.

Buetti, S. & Lleras, A. (2012). Perceiving control over aversive and fearful events
can alter how we experience those events: an investigation
of time perception in spider-fearful individuals. Frontiers
in
Psychology, 3:337. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00337. Click here.
Special issue: The Impact of Emotion
on Cognition – Dissociating between Enhancing and Impairing
Effects (Frontiers in Emotion Science Cross-Linked with Frontiers in Integrative
Neuroscience).

Buetti, S., & Kerzel, D. (2010).
Effects of saccades and response type on the Simon effect:
If you look at the stimulus, the Simon effect may be gone.
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63,
2172-1289. Click here

Buetti, S. (2012, April). Effects of the subjective experience of
control on emotion regulation: an investigation in non-anxious and
spider-fearful individuals. Presentation at the Visual Cognition and
Human Performance Division, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
USA.

Buetti, S., Mereu, S., & Lleras, A. (2012, January). Impact of
illusory control on time perception in normal and spider-fearful
individuals. Second University of Illinois Postdoctoral Research
Symposium (Illinois, USA).

Buetti, S. (2009, December). Evaluation of the Simon
effect in response programming and under different eye movement
instructions: An analysis of goal-directed and symbolic
responses. Doctoral Thesis, University of Geneva.